21 Dec 2015

Festive humour... Matthew Elliott pretends he is not an establishment figure

It's interesting to see that Matthew Elliott has broken cover to provide comments to his mate, Robert Colville, who has penned a puff piece for Vote Leave in Politico.

If it is objective journalism and impartial assessment you hope for from such publications, then abandon that hope because it should be a contender for Private Eye's 'Order of the Brown Nose'.

What makes the piece so amusing is Elliott's effort to make the hideously establishment Vote Leave group claim its enemy is the 'British establishment'. This from a man described thus by Isabel Oakeshott in Conservative Home (h/t Lost Leonardo):

A brilliant networker and consummate professional, Elliott is part of
the Westminster establishment and lives and breathes political
campaigns. Some years ago, he came within a whisker of taking a job in
Downing Street, so much so that he was given a guided tour of Number Ten
and shown his future desk.

It isn't the only example of saying black is white either, as Robert Oxley denies the dismissive insults made against Leave.EU and Arron Banks in particular.

The piece also underlines Elliott's role in Vote Leave, where he controls 'the money, the finances, liaising with the board, liaising with the parliamentary parties'. This enables him to furnish his friends (Staines, Singh and Whitehurst) with lucrative contracts, while harvesting political data about millions of voters that can be sold for a huge sum to one of the very political parties he claims to fighting at the referendum.

Rather than take on each point raised by the piece, I left the comment shown below to add to the record. It's reproduced here in case is should be mislaid from the comment thread later...